Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. Visit us at www.netapp.com.

Forbes BrandVoice™ allows marketers to
connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create
content – and participate in the conversation – on the Forbes digital publishing
platform. Each BrandVoice™ is produced
by the marketer.
More on BrandVoice™ here
, or email us directly at
brandvoice@forbes.com.

3 Ways Your CIO Can Say "Yes" -- With Softwarization Magic

IT is changing. CIOs are rethinking their roles: They want to move from being “builders and operators” to “brokers of services.”

So IT departments are having to be more agile, as their offerings get measured against slick consumer services. For example, they’re changing from being the team that runs Microsoft Exchange email—“take it or leave it”—to competing with Gmail, iCloud and other rich consumer email cloud services.

Can CIOs help build business agility? The answer is Yes. But how?

Redefining The Roles Of Hardware And Software The CIO is getting a seat at the CEO’s table and being included in strategic business conversations. Why? Because IT can have a dramatic impact on business agility and performance.

As businesses move faster to adapt to market needs, so must IT. Many larger enterprises are empowering workgroups to look outside of their own IT departments to get certain cloud services—file-sharing, archiving, databases, etc. Businesses are refusing to be tied down by legacy hardware—even embracing external IT services, if it allows them to get a step ahead of competition.

But how does an IT department become more agile? A big part of the answer is a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). An SDDC empowers IT by being a transformational, powerful backbone of your data—in three ways:

1. An SDDC Accelerates Action In a typical conventional data center, starting a new instance of an established application takes 3–5 days. Think you can stay in the running if your competitors can do the same in minutes?

The virtualized architecture of an SDDC makes provisioning fast. And if you build your SDDC right, virtualized servers can be automatically provisioned with the right capacity and resources. And as your requirements change, it’s easy to grow or shrink those servers.

At the same time, it’s important that the underlying hardware is up to the task. It should be easy to manage, monitor and scale, while providing first-class reliability and uptime. Lowering Capital expenditure but overspending on operating your SDDC is a losing proposition.

Say you needed quarterly financial reports: Would you want to have dedicated server and storage resources permanently allocated for the task, stacking up running and maintenance costs, but lying unused for 95% of the time? Of course not.

An SDDC can have dynamically provisioned resources, which provide fluid access to the data when needed. Hardware becomes an enabler to the dynamic, software-defined data center.

Even as the company expands, IT can quickly accommodate new tasks, ideas and applications, as the resources are available more quickly. Operation and management is easier: You’ll spend less time on routine tasks, and free up your personnel to focus on more productive tasks.

Let’s face it: Humans aren’t so good at repetitive tasks. We forget things. We make mistakes. … Software is much better at everyday or mundane tasks. An SDDC uses automation to perform repetitive tasks and to immediately notify administrators if something’s not right.

And by opening your horizons to a hybrid cloud architecture, you’ll be able to send targeted workloads to offsite clouds, while still retaining control. This is great for infrequent peaks of demand, such as Black Friday for retailers.

An effective SDDC pays special attention to the storage layer, because this is where the data lives: at the software-defined storage (SDS) layer. With SDS, you can consolidate storage resources under common storage software or management layer. In a non-SDS world, resources are hard-allocated into disparate silos, which increases overhead.

3. An SDDC Supports IT’s Move From Builder To Broker Departments and application owners simply don’t want to negotiate SLAs, RPOs or RTOs with an external service provider. Those tasks, and others, are part of IT’s new service-broker responsibility.

IT is well positioned to evaluate which services—internal or external—are best value. Some services may remain on-premises and completely managed by IT, other services may be serviced somewhere else, perhaps using a hybrid cloud service.

An SDDC built from a common storage infrastructure across private and hybrid clouds allows you to manage data seamlessly as it moves through its lifecycle, fluidly adjusting to changing business requirements.

This is another example of how a software-defined infrastructure helps businesses be more agile in seizing new business opportunities, be responsive to competitive threats, and be flexible in adjusting to changing spending patterns.

Don’t let legacy systems constrain the speed of service delivery or the expansion of your business needs. The world of software-defined infrastructure helps companies be more agile, more effective, more cost-efficient, and more competitive.

It’s time for CIOs to conjure up the magic of software­—to help them provide a competitive, agile advantage.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.